Microsoft Bing Owned 10.7 Percent of Searches in August

Microsoft's search engine, Bing, was used in 10.7 percent of U.S. online searches in August, according to a new report by research firm Nielsen. That placed it third in the rankings behind Yahoo with 16 percent and Google with 64.6 percent. Microsoft's month-over-month gain of 22.1 percent in market share suggests that the search engine may have legs even after Microsoft's supporting ad campaign, estimated at costing between $80 million to $100 million, runs its course.

Microsoft's
Bing search engine, which made its high-profile debut this summer, occupied
some 10.7 percent of the U.S.
search engine market in August, according to new data released by research firm
Nielsen.

That market share made Bing the fastest-growing online search provider, with a
month-over-month increase of 22.1 percent. It came in third place in the
rankings, behind Yahoo and Google.

By contrast, Yahoo saw its month-over-month share of the market decrease by 4.2
percent, to a flat 16 percent. Market leader Google saw growth of 2.6 percent
during the same period, and held 64.6 percent of overall searches.

Following up in distant fourth and fifth place were AOL
Search and Ask.com search, with 3.1 percent and 1.7 percent of the market,
respectively.

That would theoretically put Microsoft in a stronger competitive position
against Google and its 64.6 percent, although some analysts have asserted that
even the agreement between Google's two archrivals is a long way from being a
genuine survival threat.

In announcing the original deal, Microsoft CEO
Steve Ballmer suggested that the partnership would feed exponentially more
actionable data into Bing's back-office operations and thus allow it to produce
more relevant results for end users.
Since its June 3 launch, Bing has made incremental gains in the search
market, buoyed by a massive Microsoft ad campaign estimated at between $80
million and $100 million. Those gains led Ballmer to exclaim at Microsoft's
Worldwide Partner Conference in July that the search engine had momentum.

"Man, oh man, have we taken a lot of abuse, and we're still just an
itsy-bitsy part of the market, but we have a little bit of mojo," he told
the audience at the event.

Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.